Sunday, April 3, 2016

Do People Agree on What Makes One Feel Loved? A Cognitive Psychometric Approach to the Consensus on Felt Love

This pragmatic study examines
love as a mode of communication. Our focus is on the receiver side: what makes
an individual feel loved and howfelt loveis defined through daily interactions.

Our aim is to
explore everyday life scenarios in which people might experience love, and to
consider people’s converging and diverging judgments about which scenarios
indicate felt love. We apply a cognitive psychometric approach to quantify a
receiver’s ability to detect, understand, and know that they are loved.

Through
crowd-sourcing, we surveyed lay participants about whether various scenarios
were indicators of felt love. We thus quantify these responses to make inference
about consensus judgments of felt love, measure individual levels of agreement
with consensus, and assess individual response styles. More specifically, we

Results
indicate that people converge towards a shared cognitive model of felt love.
Conversely, respondents showed heterogeneity in knowledge of consensus, and in
dealing with uncertainty. We found that, when facing uncertainty, female
respondents and people in relationships more frequently judge scenarios as
indicators of felt love. Moreover, respondents from smaller households tend to
know more about consensus judgments of felt love, while respondents from larger
households are more willing to guess when unsure of consensus.

The second columns shows the mean of the answers for the
item with ‘True’ coded as 1 and ‘False’ as 0. The posterior distribution on the
consensus parameters for each item is summarized in columns 3 and 4, in terms
of posterior median estimate, labeled as ‘True’ for 1 and ‘False’ for 0 and
posterior standard deviation (abbreviated as ‘psd’). It quantifies standard
error around the point estimate. The last column shows the item difficulty rank
of the item in ascending order.